After all his years in performance analysis, Keith Lyons wrote that he had arrived at two basic principles to guide him:
Less is more.
Decisions about sharing — what is so important we have to share it?
It was 10 January 2020. Keith was responding to a paper about data analytics, workplace surveillance and the lived experience of people inside professional rugby. The field around him could collect more information than ever. His response was to ask what mattered.
He then placed communication at the centre of the analyst’s work. Technical skill was not enough. The question was how analysis could support coaches and players rather than become another transactional process around data and surveillance.
Those few paragraphs are striking because Keith was not simply describing what he did. He was showing us what he was looking for when he looked at practice.
Clyde Street contains other moments like this. Keith named the questions he was using. He told us what somebody had taught him. He said what he was trying to protect. He noticed when a label began to obscure the thing it was supposed to describe. Sometimes he told us what helped him find his way when the method itself was not enough.
The day before that 2020 post, Keith had been writing about Neil Lanham, one of the early pioneers of computer-supported analysis in football.
Keith was interested in the history, but not as a parade of inventions. He wrote that biographies help us understand the origins of analysis. Of Neil and his contemporaries he said:
“Our provenance as analysts lies with him and his colleagues.”
Keith had corresponded with Neil throughout the preparation of the post. He checked the account for veracity and sought Neil’s approval. Neil, in turn, warned him that adding, deleting or altering a single word could change what was being said.
That exchange matters. The history of analysis was not just a sequence of ideas or technologies. People remained inside the account.
There is a useful way to think about acknowledgement here. It can do more than attribute a quotation or satisfy a convention. It can preserve the provenance of judgement: who made this possible, where this way of seeing came from, and whether the people who helped shape it have been left visible.
Two weeks later, approaching his two-thousandth Clyde Street post, Keith explained what the blog itself had been for.
He said he had “always thought” of Clyde Street as a way to think out aloud and explore ideas about teaching, coaching, learning and performance. He had not anticipated an audience. He wanted those subjects in a social-media space, wanted to explore ubiquitous access, and wanted to try alternative forms of scholarly communication.
The digital form mattered to him because the writing could remain active. Links could be added. Postscripts could enrich an earlier post. Text could be changed when strong objections were raised.
Keith’s own description is hard to improve:
“I see blogging in this sense as an inclusive activity without abandoning critical judgement.”
Elsewhere he called Clyde Street his “scrapbook of ideas on teaching, learning and performing”.
Taken together, those January posts do not need to become a late-life manifesto. They give us something more useful. Keith was telling us what he was seeing: history with people still inside it; analysis as service and communication; public writing as exploration that can remain open to objection without surrendering judgement.
And when we follow those statements back through Clyde Street, earlier echoes appear.
In January 2017 Keith wrote A letter to the Secret Soccer Analyst. It begins with four apologies.
The letter is personal. Keith recalled the long working days of performance analysis in the 1990s, the analogue-video world, and his hope when he started the Centre for Notational Analysis in Cardiff that young people might find a career path into the field. He was responding to a much younger analyst whose account of working life had affected him profoundly.
Keith told the analyst that although their working worlds were very different, they shared the same vision: to provide an invisible service to coaches that records, analyses and might transform performance.
He then turned to the labour conditions of analysis. He regretted that analysts were still expected to accept unpaid or poorly paid work because association with a club was treated as compensation. He distinguished work being valued from work merely being priced.
Only then did he arrive at the questions.
He said he had not been able to gain acceptance for two “fundamental questions”:
What is so important we have to share it?
Can less be more?
The abundance of hardware and software had created, in his words, a “surfeit of options”. Keith’s answer was not simply to collect faster. He added two more questions:
What has changed in performance in training and competition?
How might feedforward transform our practice?
Three years later, two of those questions had become the basic principles he said guided him.
The important thing is not to manufacture a straight line between the posts. The connection is already interesting without one. In both, Keith was looking past the amount of analysis towards its consequence for another person. What matters? What changed? What needs to be shared? What might help practice move?
“Invisible service” also had a history that Keith chose to leave visible.
In 2012, writing about the National Sport Information Centre at the Australian Institute of Sport, Keith said Gavin Reynolds had taught him “a great deal about invisible service and altruism”.
In 2018 he returned to the Centre after hearing that one of its long-running information services was being discontinued. He described the staff’s modesty, diligence, enthusiasm and energy as an infectious guide to his own work.
Then he said it plainly:
“From them I learned the power of invisible service.”
The next sentence is just as revealing. Keith regarded the Centre as world-leading, but said its world-leading activity was in its practice, not in the rhetoric of being world-leading.
That distinction appears again in a surviving 2018 post, where Keith wrote about coaching as a humble vocation.
The post begins with a story told to him by a coach. Years earlier, the coach had driven across England to meet a player who could only train for an hour on a Thursday evening. The meeting took place under the floodlights at Thirsk racecourse, in torrential rain. A technical change the coach suggested did not work, so they moved on.
A decade later the coach and player were together in a World Cup Final dressing room after winning the tournament. Their shared memory was Thirsk.
Keith used the story to answer questions he had been carrying about “world class coaching” and coach development. His response was to challenge the labels “world class”, “world leading” and “best practice”. He wrote that practice kept changing and that our calibration against such titles could only ever be partial.
His alternative is four words:
“We can champion modesty.”
He also wanted to stop talking about coach development and talk instead about coach learning. Development, for Keith, risked becoming attached to awards and progression. Learning kept him with the continuing experience of coaching, including poor sessions as well as great ones.
The destination of that post is not greater visibility. Keith imagined the great coach becoming profoundly humble and modest, on a “journey to invisibility”.
There is another earlier coaching post that makes the orientation even clearer.
At Bradys Lake in Tasmania in March 2011, Keith wrote that he had never paddled a kayak. His canoe-slalom coaching therefore rested on real-time observation and what he called an “unequivocal commitment to athlete flourishing”.
He also admitted that he sometimes failed miserably.
Then he wrote that he had a philosophy that guided him, helped him get back on track and helped him bounce back. He was thinking about guided discovery, the relationship between philosophy and method, and the theoretical guides for his work.
His formulation was simple:
“Without the philosophy there is no compass for learning.”
This was Keith writing about his own coaching at a particular time. It does not have to carry the weight of a universal philosophy. What it gives us is more concrete: when expertise was incomplete and practice did not go as planned, Keith wanted a compass. In that post, he told us what the compass was pointing towards — athlete flourishing.
The same attention to people becomes harder-edged in a post where Keith wrote about care.
On R U OK? Day in September 2018, he reflected on five years of confidential critical-friend conversations with coaches, teachers and educational technologists. He was explicit that individual cases were not reported.
The post then turns towards organisational life. Keith worried that business-intelligence systems in a mechanistic environment could prioritise surveillance over care and treat people as objects of study rather than subjects of appreciative inquiry. He contrasted the rhetoric of caring with actually valuing people. He wrote about respectful deep listening, trust and the need to give voice to concerns that could remain unspoken in fearful relationships.
Here care is not an attractive word added after the analysis. In this source it changed what Keith was prepared to report and how he judged the use of information. Some things remain confidential. Some stories are not reported.
This is why the apparently small statements scattered through Clyde Street matter so much.
Keith did not leave only results, resources, links, analyses and reflections. At times he also left the criteria by which he was looking at them.
In these sources, the criteria are not abstract. Keith located professional value in practice rather than status; he asked information to earn its place; he treated communication as service to someone else; and he allowed care to constrain what was exposed. When expertise did not settle the next decision, he sometimes named the compass he was using. Just as importantly, the people through whom he learned to see these things do not necessarily disappear from the surviving account.
None of this requires a Keith-wide system. These are judgements Keith made visible in particular pieces of work, often alongside the situation in which the judgement mattered.
That is also what makes provenance so important.
Gavin Reynolds remains visible inside Keith’s account of invisible service. The National Sport Information Centre remains visible inside his understanding of modest, useful professional work. Neil Lanham remains visible inside the history of analysis, along with the care taken over the accuracy of his story. The Secret Soccer Analyst remains visible as the person whose open account prompted Keith to revisit what the profession was asking of its younger practitioners.
Keith did not always place himself at the centre of the picture.
Sometimes Clyde Street shows us what he learned to see because somebody else was there.
That is a different kind of intellectual record. It asks us not only, “What did Keith think?” but also: Who helped make this judgement possible? What did he recognise in their practice? What did he carry forward? Did he leave enough of that history visible for someone else to inspect?
Perhaps this is why the four questions in A letter to the Secret Soccer Analyst are such a good place to finish.
What is so important we have to share it?
Can less be more?
What has changed in performance in training and competition?
How might feedforward transform our practice?
They are Keith’s questions, formed inside his work. They do not need to become everybody else’s framework.
But they open a door.
They let us see a practitioner asking what matters, what changed, what should reach another person, and what might help that person move forward.
And around those questions, Clyde Street leaves something else visible too: the people, experiences, commitments and acts of care through which Keith learned to see.
Question to carry
Who helped make this judgement possible?
Sources followed
Keith Lyons, “What Are We Doing When We Analyse” — 20/01/10
Keith Lyons, “Neil Lanham Using Computers In Sport” — 20/01/09
Keith Lyons, “Blogging 3” — 20/01/24
Keith Lyons, “Designing And Supporting Coaches Learning Experiences” — 17/08/18
Keith Lyons, “A Letter To The Secret Soccer Analyst” — 17/01/17
Keith Lyons, “Guest Post Greg Blood On Human Performance Sport Science And Technology” — 12/07/05
Keith Lyons, “Clearinghouses And A Fourth Age Of Sport Institutes” — 18/01/26
Keith Lyons, “Coaching As A Humble Vocation” — 18/10/17
Keith Lyons, “Insights For Coaches From Learning Design” — 11/03/08
Keith Lyons, “Critical Friendship As Everyday Ruok” — 18/09/13